Whatever Walks Here, Walks Alone
by YellowFlicker
Summary: Every lonely soul knows the desolation of 3 a.m. and Oliver is no exception. That one hour knows all his secrets, and makes him want to reach for hers. (part 1 of 'Shipwrecks' series)


AN: A 'Preview' of sorts, of an AU I'm working on, in which Felicity was on the Gambit when it sank. Set sometimes around season1 of Arrow. Rated M, for Language here and there, and a bit of imagery.

Inspired by I've Never Truly Loved (Until You Put Your Arms Around Me) by theirhappystory.

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" _ **I am no good**_  
 _ **Goodness is not the point anymore**_  
 _ **Holding on to things**_  
 _ **Now that's the point**_ "

Dorothea Lasky, from "Ars Poetica," Black Life (Wave Books, 2010)

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In the dead of night, Oliver wonders at the perfect machine that is her body. She's still round and full as she's always been, but harder, more compact. There are muscles beneath her skin, toned for power, not vanity. She doesn't have the razor's edge definition that would give her away as a weapon, on the contrary: her form suggests softness. It makes her seem pliable. But Oliver knows – that softness is a both a mask and in illusion; an attractive invitation to bleeding. He knows the strength of her; felt it in her kicks, in the way she could flip them both over and how her grip was iron . In brute force, he could overcome her, but Felicity's strength lies in her incredible precision; in how she can get her body to do whatever it needs to do. It's a near-frightening sharpness she possesses, born of red-hot discipline. And it makes sense really: Felicity's inhuman focus would have lent itself naturally to perfection of technique. And she is probably the one person that could master technique down to an art form, without improvisation suffering for it. Felicity has always been like water: change and adaptation is in her nature.

All these things he finds out about her slowly, and they make him wonder. He does so to himself during the day, because the silent agreement not to prod the other's wounds still holds between them. But 3 am is a strange hour. It's the darkest part of the night, almost seductive in how it tugs the soul down self-destructive paths.

Every lonely soul knows what desolation 3 am brings and Oliver is no exception. That one hour knows all his secrets, and makes him want to reach for hers. It makes Oliver feel like asking questions. It makes him want to know things and forget why he shouldn't ask in the first place.

It's strange how alike they seem, but how different they actually are. Felicity too carries her story on her own skin, an itinerant history of her pain. But her tale is told differently from his.

Oliver's scars are naked and raw, unapologetic remnants of brutality. A map of pain he's collected and absorbed. Felicity's live beneath swirling, bright-colored tattoos, rebellious and defiant in their beauty. Defiant and taunting, a backwards slap to the vicious violence that has marked her.

A tiny yellow bird bursts into flight just above the inside of her elbow. It covers a circular jagged scar that might very well have been made by an arrow. Dancing symbols in a language he doesn't understand are written in blue ink in along her collarbone, over the neat scar from what has had to have been made by a very sharp knife. That one time when he had to sew shut a cut high on her ribs, he got to see the edges of flowers growing in every bold shade of pink beneath her breast and framing the side of it. (he'd be a bloodless liar if he said that he hadn't wondered what the rest of that one looked like) The beautiful design covered new and wrinkly skin, still angry from a burn that must have been painful enough to sear her soul. A swelling vine of green foliage and Hebrew words mix together high on right thigh, ending over her hip, and Oliver thinks he can see the Morse code of tiny teeth marks beneath it, but he can't be sure. Three innocent daisies bloom white on her side, just beneath he ribs, where three bullets have tasted her insides. Those three she told him about herself.

There are scars that she hasn't covered as well. One just at her temple, a small cut is all that remains of that tale. One on the palm of her hand, dissecting it smoothly from the base of her middle finger to the fleshy part of her thumb. An array of slithering silver lines of her back that seem to whisper 'flogging', but Oliver also knows carefully sutured wounds when he sees them. She was hurt and cared for, enough for the wounds of it to be almost imperceptible.

Oliver can barely stand to touch her these days, but what he wants (maybe its'because' that is what he wants that he doesn't trust himslef to touch) is to run his hands over every single inch of her body, know her every mark with his lips and skin on skin until he can find each one in the dark.

'what happened?'

The question is not ever present in his head. Most days they have too much to do, to think about that. To think about the past and what it meant. But sometimes it's quiet.

Sometimes, when he's working out to the sound of her fingers on the keyboard, his mind wonders. Into his own past most of the time, a mire that sucks him in and holds him with sharp teeth. A blackness that Oliver has found he can derail, if he thinks about Felicity, and the blank slate that is her own past. Sometimes, the questions become intrusive thoughts. And other times, when the sweat starts cooling on his skin and the buzz of an exhausting workout turns his joints into water, Oliver is at his most dangerous. Then, and at 3 am. Strange things start happening when he is too exhausted to stop them. Images of his hand running up her back, open palmed and greedy, assault him. He finds it hard to look at her in the face during those moments, when her tech-speak is intercepted by errand thoughts Oliver has, of his head between her thighs. Of what it would feel like to fuck her on that desk she likes so much, with her thighs wrapped around him… the curve of her spine, her breasts…

Those are the most dangerous thoughts he's had as of yet. He usually never lingers enough around her when he's like that. Because usually, in those moments, he can't really remember why it shouldn't be real. Not a single reason comes to mind.

Felicity…

Felicity Smoak, MIT class of 09.

The person that hunted his nightmares about as often as she didn't. The first life he'd taken, the one he'd thought he'd lost to the sea forever.

The woman who refused to be reduced to her suffering and rewrote her history in the way she chose fit: In bold colors over her skin, beautiful designs that juxtaposed her suffering and were guardians to her own self. The bright beauty of that choice was like snarling teeth against the abyss; a 'fuck you' to pain. Defiant scream in the face of dakness.

Even through perdition, she had made a choice.

Felicity had always believed in choice, even when she was a barely more than a kid. Oliver can't help but admire that kind of strength. He hasn't been able to do the same for himself. That's another thing that draws him in. something he wishes he could absorb from her, as if by osmosis.

Remarkable Felicity. Unshakeable Felicity.

Is it really any wonder she survived? Not really. And yet, Oliver almost hadn't recognized her the first time he'd lain eyes on her. Almost. Part of it had been shock. He'd thought she was dead – had believed it for years. The other part was the change: black hair streaked with violet, dark-painted eyes and maroon lips. A stranger with a familiar face. A screaming contradiction.

And yet, not; Not really, anyway. Because, the devil is in the details, and Oliver has learned that the truth hides in the same places as well. He can see it when she sometimes looks up at him form her chair in a way that makes his heart restless under years-old callouses. In those moments, he looks at Felicity and, for all the changes, Oliver can only see the girl she was before, years ago.

Years…

It's been years. Space and time shove themselves between the people they were once, and those they are now, creating a distance that feels unsurmountable. Its edges are jagged, like flesh torn with a rusty blade. Never to heal properly again. Filled both filled with suffering that has marked them irrevocably. Changed them. Oliver knows that well.

Five years and unconquerable ugliness between the person he is and who he was. Oliver can't even remember that boy. But it's different when he looks at Felicity. Somehow he can't look at her without seeing soft brown curls and pink lips and honest, smiling eyes. That unmarked person lurks beneath her skin like a ghost. It shows on her face sometimes – in her eyes – just a fraction of an inch beneath the surface. The kid she was is still hiding in her, stopped and scared, looking for a way out. A way to keep growing, keep living after years of repeated horror… same as he sometimes feels Oliver Queen, whoever that boy was, stirring in him, trying to reach the surface again.

Oliver knows how that feels too. He wonders if Felicity is any more prepared for it than he was.

He hadn't predicted what being around his family would do to him; how it would make things so much messier.

He hadn't expected the way Thea would make him want to be a brother again. How Tommy would make him feel like a person again, with his starving eyes and that hesitant smile that almost immediately turns into a wide grin, trying to cover for that momentary hesitation he'd felt looking at Oliver and seeing only a stranger. Trying to cover, in truth, the guilt he'd felt over it. How strange it would feel to be around his mother, the irritation at her need to control everything so familiar it almost spawned affection.

Pieces of his old life had pricked, scratched at him until Ollie Queen tried to take a deep breath using Oliver's lungs, remind him how to be human again.

Where were Felicity's pieces? Is that why she came back – to find them? Would she stay? Was he one of them? Could he be, if she needed him to?

Oliver doesn't know.

The last time he tried to help someone, didn't go over very well. One could argue that Helena had been always headed that way; as one could argue that his brokenness had scratched at her edges and torn her up even more, when he'd just been trying to help. There are parts of him that think he can't really help anyone. He can't even help himself! That he is all sharp corners and broken glass and holding on to anyone would just tear that person to shreds. That there isn't enough of a human being left beneath the skin he inhabits, for him to be good for someone else. For him to be aperson.

Until a couple of months ago, there would be nothing in him to argue with that assessment. But then something extraordinary happened: he didn't die.

Bleeding out in Queen Consolidated's parking lot, Oliver had known death had always been just an inch away from him. And beneath the fierce will to stay alive, there had been also the utterly unimpressed sense of acceptance with which he waited death. When he lost consciousness he was sure that he would die.

Seeing her face, after, he had been sure that he had.

But instead he'd lived. Against all odds and expectations. Felicity Smoak had saved his life. The girl he had thought dead for years had pulled him from the edge and shoved his head above the water again.

Extraordinary…

Like her walking into the Foundry like she's forever been there and calling it 'lair'. Like that feeling he gets, newborn and frail like a small bird in his harsh hands, when she looks up from her screens, blue light illuminating her face, and start talking a mile a minute about things he has no idea about. Like the longing stirring his soul, stretching out the kinks of disuse; a feeling so alien that the first time he'd felt it, it had almost given him a panic attack. Oliver knows this time it's not about loneliness at all. Its hope.

No wonder it felt so foreign.

All this time and he'd never left the island. Never thought of leaving it even. All this time and he'd just been waiting to die. He understood that the night she saved his life. And the same corner of Oliver that wants him to wrap himself around her and live beneath her warm skin, whispers to him that maybe around Felicity, Oliver could teach himself about waiting to live instead.


End file.
